Positioned poetically at a fork in the road, the historically designated 1959 Bank of America branch in Palm Springs shimmers in aqua mosaic tile and soars with a sculptural roof that evokes the prow of a ship. Its quirky look is not unfounded: The architect, the late Rudi Baumfeld of Los Angeles–based Gruen Associates, was influenced by Le Corbusier’s 1955 Chapelle Notre-Dame du Haut in Ronchamp, France, whose swollen, sweeping roofline is likened by many to a nun’s habit, but was actually inspired by a crab shell.
“Bank of America’s 3,700 branches represent just about every era and architectural style,” says Rebekah Sigfrids, the bank’s senior vice president of financial center design and innovation. “Even though we have an eclectic portfolio of properties — which have, to some degree, been acquired like art — this Palm Springs branch is very special and the most unique of all. We had to do right by it.”
An immaculate, three-year, multimillion-dollar restoration (the bank declines to reveal the project’s actual cost) corrected decades of design transgressions, plus some surprising structural shortcomings, all without the guidance of Baumfeld’s original drawings, which had succumbed to the ravages of humidity while in storage sometime in the 1980s. (Gruen Associates, a pioneer of the modern shopping center, is working with the Getty Museum on a proper archive of its landmark work.) The fully rehabbed bank — originally a City National branch taken over by Bank of America in 1992 — was unveiled in June to much public rapture, including an apparently uncontested Commercial Restoration Award from the Palm Springs Modern Committee.
For all of the building’s acclaim, the site itself might be equally deserving of attention. The prominent juncture where Indian Canyon and Palm Canyon drives meet undoubtedly struck Baumfeld as an auspicious location for attracting bank customers. But it also unwittingly embodied a cultural crossroads of the postwar era, when the architecture of financial institutions was shedding its long-standing neoclassical eminence.
A curved interior south wall covered in blue tiles brings the outside in for aesthetic continuity and emphasizes the cerulean sky through
the panoramic west curtain wall.
Such heavy historicism gained prominence at the turn of the 20th century as a show of security and strength. The “somber, towering tributes to the power of capitalism,” as The New York Times once described them, were perhaps mimicking the monumental Greek Revival edifice of the U. S. Treasury building in Washington, D.C. Albert Kahn, a renowned industrial architect of the time, called this aesthetic “pretentious,” given “the psychology of the average businessman.” He also rather presciently noted that banks should instead “inspire confidence in the general public.” Soon after making that statement in 1929, the stock market crashed, triggering the Great Depression.
The postwar economic boom was at least two decades away, but when it arrived in 1950, a more optimistic and open approach to banking was in vogue. According to the Historic Preservation Education Foundation, “Banking’s midcentury move to modernism … helped transform an institution that represented tradition in all facets to one that embodied a new American vision. … Glowing, glassy stores, incorporating the newest technologies, aesthetics, and materials [that were] inviting to all.”
The metamorphosis made the unique site of the Palm Springs Bank of America even more significant. “I love that you see different sides of the building depending on what street you’re driving on,” Sigfrids says. Whether the all-glass west face, the splashy aqua-tiled south end, or the stucco monolith to the east, the building’s three-sided street exposure — not unlike the Ronchamp chapel’s site on a bald hilltop — suggests confidence and no small amount of charm. “It’s a happy building,” Sigfrids says.
Midcentury Metamorphosis
Palm Springs had a lot to gain during the postwar heyday due to a posh patronage. “The city was seeing very wealthy people coming in from Los Angeles and Hollywood bringing their money with them,” says Ken Lyon, the city’s principal planner. “A handful of major banking institutions opened because there was a gob of money here. It’s like they said, ‘Let’s make sure we capture it and put it in our safe deposits and earn interest on it.’ ”
To Lyon’s point, Palm Springs maintains a robust inventory of historically designated bank architecture. The swooping, tapered colonnade of the 1960 Coachella Valley Savings & Loan No. 3 by E. Stewart Williams — now stewarded by Chase Bank — is an exhilarating take on the industry’s once-favored neoclassical columns, while Donald Wexler’s Merrill Lynch building of 1971 is, by decree of the bank, a midcentury interpretation of an ancient Greek temple manifested for the desert in glass, steel, and stone.
A vintage postcard shows the bank in its early years.
PHOTO COURTESY BANK OF AMERICA
Le Corbusier’s 1955 Chapelle Notre-Dame du Haut in Ronchamp, France, influenced architect Rudi Baumfeld in the design of his Palm Springs bank. Similarities include its curving form and bulbous roofline, meant to reference a crab shell.
Although faded vintage photos led preservationists to believe the bank was once gray, restoration efforts ultimately revealed its former color, the taupe you see today.
In the face of such historicist tendencies, or what might be called new formalism, Bank of America is emphatically tangential. “The bank exhibits a more organic, almost romantic, form of architecture,” Lyon says of its expressionist style, whose asymmetry and naturalistic themes disrupt the rationality and rigor that tend to define modernism.
Neptunian forms were seemingly popular muses for expressionist bank architects of the midcentury. Besides Bank of America’s apparent crab shell inspiration, however unintentional, other examples include a 1960s Chase Bank (recently shuttered) in Manhattan Beach. Designed by the late architect Chancy Miles Lott, its “white roof resembles a giant clam,” according to the Los Angeles Conservancy. Farther afield, the 1967 Englewood branch of the Community Banks of Colorado, designed by the late Charles Deaton, is often compared to a mollusk, while his 1964 spherical, segmented design in Casper, Wyoming — now a Wells Fargo — conjures a sea urchin.
Peeling an Onion
Although most people consider the Bank of America’s bulbous borders to be its prevailing feature, for Sarah Yoon, Palm Springs historic preservation officer, something else steals the show. “I see the material, the stucco,” she says. “The expression of the material and the freedom that it gave the architect to mold different shapes is what I think is really cool about this building.” Stucco’s visual plasticity and papier-mâché-like texture also give the building an air of lightness, another deviation from the solemn stone pantheons of yore.
Of course, restoring materials to their original glory is a primary commandment of the devotional work of historic preservation. (The domain of Palm Springs’ preservation commission, led by Lyon and Yoon, is limited to the exterior of historic city structures, while interior modifications are monitored by the building department.) “The beauty of restoration is that it’s not flashy. You wouldn’t necessarily notice it. You’d never cover up Colonial Williamsburg in aluminum siding,” Lyon says. “We put things back the way they were so we can understand the cultural and historical context of the architecture.”
The bank during construction, which required more work than expected.
PHOTO COURTESY BANK OF AMERICA
What began as a rather straightforward effort to restore the bank’s exterior — new paint here, ATM alterations there — turned into what design director Michael McAllister of the Gensler architecture firm, explains as “peeling an onion; every time we pulled a layer back, we’d find something else to fix.”
Starting with the building’s top coat, Lyon acknowledges that the preservation department “failed miserably” in selecting light gray for a repaint 10 years ago, citing misleading reference photos. Unscrewing an electric cover plate during the restoration effort revealed the building’s original taupe, a color reminiscent of old adobe structures of the Southwest, and seen on the building today. The two glass curtain walls on the west and north faces were discovered to have no structural connection to the roof, a seismic no-no. Fortifying those features exemplifies the restoration paradox: preserving the original aesthetic to modern safety standards. “We’re not creating a museum piece,” Yoon says. “This is a functioning financial institution that is evolving with the times.”
Surprisingly, the cantilevered soffits that give the roofline its distinctive round character are an architectural element unto themselves. “The soffits had been hung from the building and were actively dropping and detaching,” McAllister explains. “It was painful to see those original soffits destroyed, but we had no choice but to rebuild them.”
As it turns out, Baumfeld, a 1940 émigré from Austria, exhibited curvilinear tendencies in his work long before taking inspiration from the Ronchamp chapel. Michael Enomoto, managing partner of Gruen Associates, says the tubular, sinuous, bending forms can be seen in Baumfeld’s original designs for the 1949 Milliron’s Department Store in Westchester, California, and at the erstwhile May Company department stores in Buena Park and Costa Mesa.
A fountain originally marked the bank’s north entrance but was removed long ago. Palm Springs principal planner Ken Lyon surmises that splattering water may have resulted in safety issues.
PHOTO COURTESY PALM SPRINGS HISTORICAL SOCIETY
Tiled surfaces big and small were another Baumfeld special, as seen on other Gruen projects besides the Palm Springs bank, including the Ohrbach’s — now a Marshalls — in Torrance. It is a two-story rectangular structure with a familiar rounded roofline and faced almost entirely in glazed blue tiles. This signature element, Enomoto says, nods to Baumfeld’s appetite for precision — he was a master at never having to cut tile to fit a space.
Myriad tiles adorning the Bank of America exterior had been lost to time, either forcibly removed by sticky-fingered passersby or unfastened in the course of normal weathering. But with no stockpile of original replacements to dig into, McAllister and his team devised a clever solution to restore the bank’s bespangled glory: remove pieces from the bottom of the tile fields to patch the conspicuous holes higher up, then cover the strategically stripped area with an unassuming stainless steel toe kick. Charmed by the transformation, Lyon likens the building to “a gorgeous little jewel box.”
Girth Control
But there was more architectural sequinning to be completed inside. Replacements for the missing aqua tiles on a curved interior south wall were extracted from an otherwise anonymous mezzanine-level hallway. And the golden mosaic tile floor scale surround was meticulously preserved in the restoration after being entombed in drywall for decades.
In an era before bathroom scales were de rigueur in households nationwide, public “penny scales” helped Americans with, as a 1927 New York Times satisfyingly punned, “girth control.” The free-of-charge Bank of America scale was installed accordingly; some say the funhouse technology distracted kids while their parents did their banking. For better or worse, the amusement factor lives on: Today, the scale is functional but not calibrated for precise measurement.
Located near the bank entrance, the original tiled floor scale had been hidden away beneath drywall.
Another interior element reclaimed from history is the newly poured-in-place terrazzo floor, commonly seen in midcentury banks. At some point, unsightly square egg-crate lighting replaced the original design’s can lights, arranged in an attractive radial pattern. The new 7-foot-diameter mesh-covered LED luminaires are, Sigfrids says, “a lovely nod to the original lights and give the space such a beautiful glow.” (With the building’s hard surfaces and lofty volumes providing ideal conditions for a significant echo, the fabric diffusers also absorb some sound.)
Even the most intentional restorations are not without sacrifice. Lyon is particularly wistful about a metal brise soleil that once offered shading and ornamentation to the bank’s west wall. Although historic photos prove its existence, no official city record exists of its unfortunate dismantling. “It looked like the grille of an old Buick,” he says. Although Sigfrids confirms that Bank of America had considered rebuilding the screen, “losing the gorgeous view ultimately made it too costly.” In addition, a large outdoor fountain had been long ago removed from the north entrance — Lyon suspects excessive splattering onto the pavement had become a safety issue. Even though most of us can’t miss what we never had, Sigfrids claims that the custom circular sofas inside the building nod to Baumfeld’s original water feature.
Detailing over an upstairs window.
An original light fixture.
A Balancing Act
People came out in droves when the Bank of America restoration was ceremoniously unveiled on June 14. Although no official figures denote actual bank patrons, it’s likely that many attendees were preservation enthusiasts. When a building is integral to your routine — even if you simply catch glimpses of it while driving — it’s part of your personal infrastructure. And inasmuch as the bank is tied to the community, the community also recognizes that historic architecture — Palm Springs has one of the largest concentrations of midcentury buildings in the world — equals revenue.
“What’s most important about preservation is that it is a balancing act,” Lyon says. “Historically important buildings that are privately owned can’t be freeze-dried for posterity. They have a right to be used and enjoyed to the highest extent possible.”
mark your calendar
The Palm Springs Modern Committee will honor Bank of America and the city of Palm Springs with the Commercial Restoration Award on Oct. 19 at the 2024 Architectural Preservation Awards. For tickets and additional information, visit psmodcom.org.
